Emanuel Tegene, Karma (2022), oil on canvas, 164 x165 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bwo Art Gallery.
Bwo Gallery is pleased to announce Until the Mockingbird Stops to Sing, a solo exhibition by Ethiopian artist Emanuel Tegene. Running from March 6 to April 26, 2025, this exhibition explores power, memory, and resistance through Tegene’s dynamic and layered paintings, in a neo-expressionist style he has developed over the past 15 years.
In Until the Mockingbird Stops to Sing, the mockingbird serves as a powerful metaphor for Tegene’s approach to painting—where observation is never passive, and repetition becomes a form of resistance. Like the bird, his work mimics, challenges, and warns, engaging with the complexities of power, inheritance, and memory. Layering acrylic spray, oil stick, and gestural brushwork, Tegene constructs compositions where meaning remains in flux—arrows never quite land, symbols refuse to settle, and history is continuously rewritten. His figures navigate politics, relationships, and the performances of power that shape everyday life, reminding us that silence is never an absence, but a force that demands to be reckoned with.
Discussing this collaboration, the founders of Bwo Gallery, Noelle Mukete-Elhalaby and Brice Yonkeu say: “At a time when peace is increasingly fragile, presenting Tegene’s work feels more urgent than ever, offering a powerful meditation on resilience, truth, and the forces that shape our world ”. This exhibition highlights the expressiveness and urgency of Emanuel Tegene’s practice, presenting works created between 2022 and 2025. Rooted in the raw energy of Neo-Expressionism, his paintings explore the tensions between power and vulnerability, presence and erasure, history and its echoes. His use of electric blues, deep crimsons, and bruised yellows does not merely depict but disrupt, recalling the dynamism of Jean-Michel Basquiat while remaining deeply anchored in Ethiopian narratives. Through fractured figures, recurring symbols, and gestural mark-making, Tegene constructs a visual lexicon of influence and resistance, where meaning is never fixed, and each painting serves as both a marker and a warning.
Dividing his time between Addis Ababa, Abidjan, and Dakar, Emanuel Tegene’s work is shaped by the political and social complexities of the African continent. His paintings in this exhibition, including African Leaders and The North Face, offer sharp critiques of governance and power structures. The North Face, a standout piece in the exhibition, embodies the contradictions of place and memory, its bright background juxtaposed against the tensions of Ethiopia’s northern region—a site of both historical pride and political turmoil. “My work is a direct response to life as it unfolds, transforming everyday observations into art that speaks to memory, emotion, and human relationships. Each painting holds a story, a moment captured and reimagined through my own visual language,” explains Emanuel Tegene.
Until the Mockingbird Stops to Sing is an invitation to engage with a practice that is as politically astute as it is deeply human. Tegene’s work does not offer answers, but it insists on the importance of looking, questioning, and bearing witness.
Download full press release and curatorial text below.
